The American filmmaking debut of the 32-year-old
Danish
director
Nicolas Winding Refn ("Pusher"/"Bleeder") is a mixed
blessing, as it's
a well-crafted slick thriller that stimulates interest
but fizzles
though
derivative of the better intellectual enigmatic films
like Antonioni's
Blow-Up (1966) and Coppola’s The Conversation
(1974)--that had its lead
character with the almost similar name of Harry Caul.
It just leaves
too
much off the screen to cohere as a whole film. It's
written by the late
Hubert Selby Jr. ("Last Exit to Brooklyn") and Mr.
Refn. Though the
existential
thriller promises much, it eventually implodes as it
bogs down with an
unsatisfying opaque ending that fits to a tee what is
meant by being
arthouse
pretentious.

Wisconsin shopping-mall security guard Harry Caine
(John
Turturro)
is still grieving the recent motiveless, random murder
of his pregnant
wife Claire in his mall's underground parking lot,
that also resulted
in
the murder of a policeman--possibly a contract
killing. The obsessed,
mild-mannered,
guilt-ridden Harry investigates the crime on his own
when not satisfied
with the apathetic police investigation into the
unsolved
double-murder,
and spends his free time breaking down closed-circuit
security film at
the mall and filling his living room wall with photos
of suspects and
news
clippings. Harry suspects that an empty house across
the street from
his
home, that was temporarily rented, was used for
surveillance and when
he
breaks in he only finds a snapshot of a nameless
blonde woman (Deborah
Kara Unger) posing with her child by a restaurant;
that diner clue
leads
him to a small rural Montana town in the dead of
winter (with Canada
filling
in for Montana). Harry stays at a $50 a night hotel,
with a gaudy color
scheme of blood-red walls for corridors, that offers
favors for its
male
guests. In the morning he shows the snapshot at the
local diner to an
inquisitive
policeman (Mark Houghton) and is soon visited by
another tormented
decorated
policeman named Peter Northrup (James Remar), who
claims to know the
woman
in the snapshot (who is actually his apprehensive
wife) and wants to
talk
with Harry before taking him to see her. A traumatized
Harry makes it
clear
he's not after revenge, but only wants to know "Why?"
his wife was
killed.

Harry's obsession with wanting to know answers will
lead to
loss
of job, his relationships, his overwhelming death-wish
and his
inability
to distinguish between the real and dream world, as he
seems to be a
possessed
man unafraid of death and not unduly perturbed by the
desolate
environment
or by confronting his wife's killer. Unfortunately the
confrontation
between
the guilt-ridden killer and the innocent bystander's
loving husband
leaves
us short-changed. Caine's search for answers to a
criminal puzzle is
only
meant to be a tease that raises more questions than it
answers.

The overblown score by Brian Eno, the Lynchian
evocation of
a grief-stricken
soul and the intense Barton Fink performance by
Turturro are all catchy
but non-binding, in a psychological thriller that
still had enough
chills
to make it better than many such neo-noir films.